Manufacturing the storage medium includes performing a variety of steps any of which can result in a defective region on the storage medium. Further, defective regions may develop over the time that the storage medium is used. Writing data to a defective region can result in the loss of such data. To avoid this, some approaches have been developed to identify defective regions as unusable. This works reasonably well, but is not able to consistently identify short and shallow defects on a storage medium, especially for random sequences.
Hence, for at least the aforementioned reasons, there exists a need in the art for advanced systems and methods for identifying defects on a storage medium.